File Card: Old Card Clothing Tacked to a Wooden Handle (Nicholson, 1878)

The workshop file card of the 1870s: a strip of old, worn-out card clothing tacked to a piece of wood with a handle shape at one end. The Nicholson File Company (1878) calls it the common way to clean the larger files, usually rudely made by the worker himself, and warns that the handle may split when it is tacked and that the clothing soon works loose. Nicholson gives no sizes, no wood and no tacks; those are unknown here. Source: W. T. Nicholson, A Treatise on Files and Rasps (Nicholson File Co., 1878), pp. 38, 73-74. Picture: Nicholson's plate of his own glued File Card (p. 38), for comparison; the tacked card itself is not drawn.